[Support request] My Generatepress Website speed are very slow (4 sek.)

[Henrik]

My page speed is 4 sec. or above even though I have made all my 500 images smaller. I just don’t know what to do to make the website speed better on my https://marathontrainingbuddy.com/
I will be very grateful if you could help me!

Best Regards
Henrik

[Hung]

Might be your internet connection? The site is not the fastest, but not too slow.

[Henrik]

Hi Hung
Thank you for the answer. I can see you know my earlier question. Since it’s my “home internet connection” maybe it’s faster another place in the world? Anyway is there something I can do to make my site speed faster or should I just leave it there?

Best Regards
Henrik

[mkjj]

I don’t know where you are located. But your site speed is ok checked from a London server (1.4 sec.) and pretty good checked from an US-Server (1.2 sec.). Did Google Pagespeed show 4 seconds? Pagespeed is next to useless in my opinion.

[Henrik]

Hi Hung
I’m very satisfied with your answer. And now I know how the “procedure” is for another time.
Thank you for the support

Best Regards
Henrik

[David]

Hi Henrik,

if you run a Page Speed Insights report it lists a number of opportunities. I ran a quick test to see:

https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmarathontrainingbuddy.com%2F

and here is my views on what you can do to make improvements:

1. Reduce initial server response time
This can be improved by implementing Page Caching. Check with your Hosting company if this is an option on your server.
If it is then ask them to enable it – if it is not then you may want to use a Page Caching plugin.

2. Eliminate render-blocking resources
You have several CSS / JS Files loading some of which may not be necessary.
If you scroll down the report to Diagnostics and check Reduce Unused CSS we can see three of the render blocking files, and the dianostic says they could be reduced 100%. We can deal with two like so:

a) Dashicons – unless a plugin is using them, this should not load on the Front End, only for Admin areas.
To remove them to any user who is not logged in you can add this PHP Snippet to your site:

add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'bs_dequeue_dashicons' );
function bs_dequeue_dashicons() {
    if ( ! is_user_logged_in() ) {
        wp_deregister_style( 'dashicons' );
    }
}

b) blocklibrary/styles.css – this is the Core Block styles that aren’t being used on the front page, and neither will tehy be used in the archive pages. So you can dequeue those styles with this PHP Snippet:

function db_dequeue_block_styles_on_home(){
    if (is_front_page() || !is_singular() ) {
    	wp_dequeue_style( 'wp-block-library' );
	    wp_dequeue_style( 'wp-block-library-theme' );
	}
} 
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'db_dequeue_block_styles_on_home', 100 );

This article explains how to Add PHP Snippets to your site:

https://docs.generatepress.com/article/adding-php/

3. Properly size images
If you expand the list, the top 3 images all look like ones in the Sidebar, they are all coming from a 3rd party server – there isn’t much you can do about that other then contact the provider and see if they can load smaller size images.

4. Not on the list of opportunities is one Google likes to forget to tell you about and that is Google Fonts. They are 3rd party requests and can slow a site down quite significantly.
Options:
a. Use a system font instead of google fonts in the Customizer. Easy and makes the biggest improvement but you don’t have any real design decision on the font.
b. Load them locally – more complicated, not as a big an improvement as #1 but you choose the font.

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